Off Grid Living , Renewable Energy
I am an independent contractor building an off grid home in the national forest. This group is for folks interested in knowing more about the project, but also a place to share your own construction related stories. This group is not only for construction professionals, I would love to hear from everyone who has tried to build something naked, from a bird house in the garage and up. Lets have...
- created by MickeyH
New guy here. Have an off-grid home.
Return to DiscussionsHello,Like it says, I am new here to the group, and really look forward to sharing ideas with all of you about off-grid living.
My partner and i have designed and built an off-grid house with a well, septic, and to full energy code on 40 acres in in the mountains in north central washington state in the U.S. It has a photovoltaic electric panels fixed mounted on a 9/12 pitch roof facing slightly east of south. This takes advantage of our eastern exposure. On the northeast corner I have added to the original house a passive solar sun/view room with insulated rock storage beneath a poured slab with PEX tubing for radiant if I want to install it and get around to it. also ductwork that ties into the air handling system I designed into the main house.
I am retired from working doing other things, but was a builder in the 70s and during the 80s I designed and installed solar systems. I designed passive and active thermal solar, as well as geothermal heat pump systems some with thermal solar in the loop. Went to ARCO solar school but never had a cost-effective application, till I started building in 2004.
I have Mitsubishi PV panels, about 30 percent undersized for my battery bank. I did this because it has been a vacation use cabin and would have time to recover a full charge while idle. I have a 24v dc to 120 v ac 4000W trace true sine wave inverter and have designed everything to be low energy use. It has worked very well, except for some battery abuse that shortened the life of the first batch. Now I have batteries supposed to be very long lasting and tough. I hope so.
This is a project built on weekends when I could fit them in. Constantly a work in progress.I will check out the current threads and look forward to interacting here. I will try to get some pictures taken of the system in the next few days which I will post. I am happy to discuss any aspect of my project or yours.
Feel free to friend me.
Sam
Good to hear of your set up. I'm planning to backfit a 30 year old house to be energy independent, but I'm mainly doing that so I can sell it for more and to help my build my own completely energy independent domicile with that profit.
BrawnyTony,Thanks for the welcome. That sounds like quite the project. If you can turn this conversion into a whole energy independent house, that would be very cool.I'd like to hear about the project.Will you be grid tied or totally off grid? Are you working on the efficiency of your lights, refrigeration, motors, etc. or will this be sized to managed standard grid-supplied kw load? Sam